Last Peg Going In!

It's official: we're done with the timber frame for the roof. (there will be a bit more notching and pegging for the loft) It was much more labor-intensive than I first expected, but all in all, worked out as well as we'd hoped.

After hand shaping something like 150 pegs, this one on the west center tallest post was the last one to go in. We wrote the date and our names on it, though I hope no one ever sees that.






The final southern bent and the girts to connect it took 50 pegs, and we did all the drilling, pounding, and cutting off in just two days.


The tarps are up on parts of the structure as it was threatening rain all week.

Starting to get a bit colder

As the days and nights turn colder, we're getting ready for winter. Jack isn't so sure he likes Melissa's help with that though.




In an interesting 'local food' twist, Melissa has gotten onto a wild tea leaf collecting and drying kick. Here's some of the many different kinds of leaves she's gathered on advice from 'Native Plants and Foods of California', a book we got from the library.




I think the biggest pile is blackberry leaves!

Work goes on, but slowly

Melissa has been doing most of the varnishing, now that we've done the bug spray twice over, and it looks like we've beat the weather enough that there isn't a huge scramble to get some coverage on the beams before a rain.

She is the careful meticulous one, and I still have pegs to make for the south bent. I can't believe the structure still needs 50 more pegs.

In the meantime, I started doing some clearing of brush down below the yurt, now that I'm getting comfortable with 'managing the wild' (a book I'm reading about California native peoples and how they worked the land for food and life)

So I was cutting down a batch of hazelnut bushes, and decided to make my next compost pile bin in a more traditional manner. It's not that hard to get them bent together, and it's not that hard to cut them down, but collecting the good ones and dragging them over to the spot you want to make the fence/bin is tiring.

And, Some Corrections

In the process of standing the last 'bent' up, we had to make some changes in where the bottoms of the posts landed on the concrete footings. Unfortunately, where I had placed the J bolts back a million years ago when we had the concrete poured was not correct.

Thus, we had to take them out.

We'll probably do some fancy drilling into the concrete with some powerful drill and either glue down new bolts or possibly just get some new-fangled screws.

It's All Standing!

We got it hooked up yesterday, and while it still needs to be pegged, all the timbers are in place. That feels good.

We also need to treat them with an anti-bug thing, and varnish them, but still, they look pretty good.

And they hold up pretty well!

Southern Bent moving up

Once we got this thing together, it wasn't hard to start moving it up. A neighbor came by yesterday and wanted to help, so we were able to get quite a ways up in the air. At the end of today, we're almost at 45 degrees.






It's starting to look like something with some structure now. Here's Melissa gathering lumber for the 'cribs' which hold up the logs as we're moving them up.

Dodging the Rain

While the rain doesn't melt you or anything, it can make working on wood with metal tools a bit frustrating. Trying to avoid the ever-advancing mold, we're spreading tarps around to try and keep the timbers dry-ish.

it doesn't really work, even with gigantic tarps.

Girts are up!

These girts, the horizontal ties that connect the 'bents' and add the much needed sheer strength to a timber frame, are up and in place.

Here's Melissa posing below the Southeastern one, which is the one that fell on me yesterday and knocked me to the ground. Yes, my head still hurts.



And here's the Southwestern one, fitted and waiting for the southern bent to come up and connect. They're at about level, it's the ground that's at a different height.

Working away

Melissa has been doing a great job removing the mold that showed up on the logs for the southern bent (how annoying that we have to peel them twice). The logs look so much better after she's done.



This is me drilling the last mortis hole of the whole assembly. We have to go back and fix stuff and do some more drilling (let alone the peg holes) but basically, this was the last one. finally.

We do breakfast right

The fresh bread (out of the dutch oven, not the earth oven) and two boiled eggs in antique Spanish egg holders. yum.

Angry Blue Man moves Timber!

We're onto the southern 'bent', so that means checking each joint individually before putting it all together. It also means a lot of heavy lifting and pushing stuff around. Very tiring, but at least it's not raining.


Note all the annoying MOLD that is already setting up on the beam (what my foot is on). Melissa is now going back and scrapping that off, which really amounts to another round of peeling.